Zameer Razack

Musical Thinking: Designing New Media from Musical Perspectives

Musical structures and processes can unfold a lot of resources to tackle non-musical problems. An example of this can already be found in the works of a big thinker of the past, Iannis Xenakis, who took the structures he found in his compositions to create architectural works and vice versa. With these means he also managed to create a complete synthesis of architecture, music and light: his Polytopes, which can be regarded as a primitive version of what we call Educational Multimedia nowadays. Musical thinking also unfolds methods and means about how to use the aspect of time in various types of media. The architect Daniel Libeskind has, with the Berlin Jewish Museum he designed, a really good example which shows an inventive way of, not only how visitors spend time in this architectural space, but also how the sense of historical time is implemented by taking very strong notions of these aspects of time into the design process. And last, but not least, there’s the way of looking at multidisciplinary cooperation within projects: how smaller individual processes can be streamlined into larger structures retaining it’s coherence and aesthetic-values as a whole, like the invidual players of an orchestra playing playing individual segments, all together, forming the complete musical structure you’re hearing.

In all: these three points: musical structure, time and mutidisciplinarity make up the paradigm that folds out over the variety of projects that I’ve been doing and am going to do in the future.